Every woman’s experience of motherhood is unique, we have all experienced it first hand by the simple fact that we have all been born. Sometimes it is through these formative experiences that our perceptions and persuasions around how we need to be as a woman are shaped—propelling us toward or repulsing us away from motherhood, sometimes it is an innate intuition to have children or not have children, sometimes it seems by accident or intervention.

However it is that the reality appears to land there are as many angles on the subject as there are people in the world.

Despite all angles, the assumption that “a woman is this…” and “a mother is that…” informs all facets of life including cultural, social, family, relationship or work. If thoroughly digested those outside narratives can become inside narratives where they become the thoughts that we think are our own. Later, through circumstance, these thoughts and desires aren’t always met with a reality and sometimes this can be experienced in disruptive or challenging ways. Yet it is often in these moments of apparent dissonance that we are able to see things in a way we weren’t able to before. What we once accepted as a ‘norm’ is no longer a ‘norm’ or a possibility, let alone a reality, and then life as we formerly thought we knew it unravels.

Mariette Reineke experienced this when a desire and need to have children wasn’t met with the reality. What was assumed as a given, an evolutionary necessity, a life calling and purpose became a complicated, tenuous, effortful endeavour where life circumstances didn’t meet the expectation. Subsequently many veils were lifted on what she once thought was true.

Through this realisation and many others this website is inspired as a space to share through interviews and articles some of the many expressions on what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a mother so that the multi-dimensional richness that is Women & Motherhood may be as apparent as it really is.